New Delhi: The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to US poet Louise Glück in Stockholm on Thursday. Glück is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who is also a professor of English Literature at Yale University.
“Glück made her debut in 1968 with ‘Firstborn’ and was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature. She has published twelve collections of poetry and some volumes of essays on poetry,” the committee has said. Her works are “are characterised by a striving for clarity. Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a thematic that has remained central with her”.
In addition to her poetry collections, Glück is also a renowned essay writer and literary critic. Her first published work appeared in 1968.
‘Averno’ (2006) is a masterly collection, a visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death. Another spectacular achievement is Louise Glück’s latest collection, ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’ (2014).#NobelPrize
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 8, 2020
Glück lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The prize has been awarded almost every year since 1901 and is seen as one of the most reputable literary awards in the world.
Like much of public life around the world, this year’s awards have taken place under the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, which led to the cancellation of the splashy Nobel prize-giving ceremony held each December in Stockholm.
Instead, a televised event will be held with winners receiving their honours in their home countries.
Tumult and controversy
This year’s prize comes after years of tumult and controversy. The 2018 the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, the secretive body that chooses the winners, and sparked a mass exodus of members.
After the academy revamped itself in a bid to regain the trust of the Nobel Foundation, two laureates were named last year, with the 2018 prize going to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke.
Handke’s prize caused a storm of protest: a strong supporter of the Serbs during the 1990s Balkan wars, he has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes. Several countries including Albania, Bosnia and Turkey boycotted the Nobel awards ceremony in protest, and a member of the committee that nominates candidates for the literature prize resigned.
The prize comes with a gold medal and a 10 million krona (more than $1.1 million) prize.
Earlier in the week, the awards for medicine, physics and chemistry were already handed out. Friday sees the announcement of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, while the prize for economics will be awarded next week.
(With inputs from Reuters and DW)